A full-text search comprises a technique for searching one or more computer-stored documents or a collection of documents that are stored in a database. A full-text search may differ from searches based on metadata or searches based solely on parts of the texts (e.g., titles, abstracts, selected sections, or bibliographical references).
In a conventional full-text search, a search engine may examine each word in every stored document as the full-text search attempts to match search criteria such as a specific term or a phrase that is specified by a user (e.g., a text string). Full-text search applications may have to handle large sets of data. For example, there may be millions of documents that need to be searched for a single text string.
When using a conventional full-text search to search for a term or phrase by scanning each document for the term or phrase, a search runtime, and corresponding CPU consumption, may be extremely high. Therefore, a full-text search that can reduce a search runtime and CPU consumption is desirable.